It’s always funny to me what’s funny to me after two nights of little to no sleep. Today in my son’s virtual school his teacher put up a link for a song and the link didn’t work despite numerous attempts on her part.

So that’s how my son and I ended up singing several enthusiastic (if tuneless) rounds of “Service Unavailable . . . HTTP . . . Error 503 . . . This Service Is UNavailable!”

Recently I started watching Ash vs Evil Dead, nothing particularly surprising in that fact, but it did give me an odd moment when I went to make a phone call right after watching an episode. For one moment having “Evil” on my contacts list took on a whole new meaning . . .

(His actual name is “Evel,” presumably after Evel Knievel, of course.)

What follows is funny story I heard from a server last night. I’m not sure I fully believe this actually happened to her because I’d like to think that nobody would ever say this without being kidding, but the story is funny none the less:

So I had this table, big party, like fourteen people, and I got the impression that they were not going to be good tippers (You get a feel for that sort of thing after a while.), but I wasn’t too worried about it because this was back in the days when we were allowed to automatically include the gratuity on big parties. I gave them my best service, and, yes, they ran me ragged, but they weren’t really mean about it or anything, so there was that, and the final ticket, of course, came out to several hundred dollars.

Like I said, I’d already gotten the feeling that no matter what I did there wasn’t going to be a big tip in my future, but what I wasn’tprepared for was there being no concept of tipping at all! (And, yes, they were American, where, like it or not, tipping is part of the culture.)

“Okay,” I heard one of them announce once the bill had arrived. “Who ordered the ‘gratuity’? Because that is expensive!'”

When she was a child, L’s Mother spent a lot of time around a couple of British expatriates. Since these were her formative years, it left her with traces of a BBC worthy accent with certain words, primarily those that sound something like ‘really’ . . . but only when she’s tired.

Today turned out to be an incredibly busy day for us all (hence the lateness of this entry), and at one point I asked her how she was doing.

“I was going to hide how ‘weary’ I am,” she replied. “But I have a tell.”

Today, it being one of “those days,” I decided I’d best jot down a quick list of priorities for the day to help keep me on track. Having done that, I labeled the text file “Priorities” and started to move on, then I realized it being one of “those days,” I’d best be more specific least the file get lost in the shuffle, so I tried to change the title to “Today’s (4/28) Priorities.”

Fun fact: My computer doesn’t like it and ignores me when I try to include a “/” character in my text file titles, so the actual title came out to “Today’s (428) Priorities.”

This at first struck me as depressing, but then I realized the title would take on an entirely different meaning if today had only been the 20th of this month . . .

But “occasionally volatile” moments aside, I’m hanging in there, and while I’m not breaking any sustained smiling records, I have caught myself smiling from time to time, even on that same drive with the ill-timed billboard question.

Further down the road, you see, I ended up behind a semi-trailer truck with a big left-pointing arrow reading “passing side” on its back, but when I saw what the right-pointing arrow read, I felt myself smiling.

On a lighter note, an old riddle was making the rounds on my Facebook over the weekend, “What belongs to you, but others use it more than you do?” The standard answer is, of course, “your name,” but one of my nephews chimed with a somewhat tongue-in-cheek answer that hit a little too close to home for me of late: